Yeah, I thought that headline would get your eyes to widen! 🙂
I see many atheist cry out against islam, calling it a barbaric religion and so on, and they are right… at this point in history.
But there was a time when it wasn’t so backwards, violent and frankly… even more backwards than some of the other religions today, and THAT is saying something.
So, here’s the story of how a reasonable, somewhat educated, people turned from science to… what we have today.
For a very long time every educated person had Aristotle as the main source for higher discussions, philosophy and science.
Remember, Aristotle was the father of science everybody who educated themselves read Aristotle at some point, it was a given.
How ever… in the late 16:th century early 17:th century Iran, in walks a muslim philosopher and theologian called Mulla Sadra.
He was a controversial thinker for his time and even got himself both condemned and excommunicated at one point.
Dealing with mostly philosophy he was educated in many other scientific fields by the masters of his time.
Mulla Sadra pointed out holes in the Aristotle philosophy and thus (very short) changed the muslim world from there on.
He was on solid ground in his criticism against Aristotle but the critique took a turn for the worst.
Suddenly there was a “Mulla Sadra way” – The muslim illumination, and the Aristotelian way to think, act and do things.
In my opinion, that’s the point where the muslim religion took over and science went to shit in the muslim world because science, as we know it, was not really in demand any more.
Now there was the illumination movement with the prophet as the truth sayer and not much science after that.
Here in the christian world, we went on our merry way and industrialized the shit of everything. 🙂
Now you know a small part of the background to why there is so little science (in our understanding of the word) in the muslim world.
Aristotle – Wikipedia
Mulla Sadra – Wikipedia
Note: Illumination is just that – enlightenment, nothing to do with “Illuminati” more than the derivation of the word.
Here endeth the lesson. 🙂
The God Extinguisher 